The double-act of Bertie Wooster and his faithful butler Jeeves is the greatest comic pairing in literature. Millions of fans worldwide have laughed at the travails of Bertie and delighted at the felicitous solutions devised by Jeeves to extricate his master 'from the soup'. Penguin first published Wodehouse in 1936, a year after the company was founded, and this volume offers two ofthe comic master's best-loved stories.

'Bertie,' said young Bingo, having sat down on the bed and diffused the silent gloom for a moment, 'how is Jeeves's brain these days?'

'Fairly strong on the wing, I fancy. How is the grey matter, Jeeves? Surging about pretty freely?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Thank heaven for that,' said young Bingo 'for I require your soundest counsel. Unless right-thinking people take strong steps through the proper channels, my name will be mud.'

'What's wrong, old thing?' I asked, sympathetically.

Bingo plucked at the coverlet.'I will tell you,' he said. 'I will also now reveal why I am staying in this peat-house, tutoring a kid who requires not education in the Greek and Latin languages but a swift slosh on the base of the scull with a black-jack. I came here, Bertie, because it was the only thing I could do. At the last moment before she sailed to America, Rosie decided that I had better stay behind and look after the Peke. She left me a couple of hundred quid to see me through till her return. This sum, judiciously expanded over the period of her absence, would have been enough to keep Peke and myself in moderate affluence. But you know how it is.'

'How what is?'

'When someone comes slinking up to you in the club and tells you that some cripple of a horse can't help winning even if it develops lumbago and the botts ten yards from the starting post. I tell you, I regarded the whole thing as a cautious and conservative investment.'

'You mean you planked the entire capitol on a horse?'

Bingo laughed bitterly.'If you could call the thing a horse. If it hadn't shown a flash of speed in the straight, it would have got mixed up with the next race. It came in last, putting me in a dashed delicate position. Somehow or other I had to find the funds to keep me going, so that I could win through till Rosie's return without her knowing what had occurred. Rosie is the dearest girl in the world but if you were a married man, Bertie, you would be aware that the best of wives is apt to cut up rough if she finds that her husband has dropped six weeks' housekeeping money on a single race. Isn't that so, Jeeves?'

'Yes, sir. Women are odd in that respect.'

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